The issue of women’s empowerment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has gained much momentum over the past few decades. The World Bank selected the topic of gender equality and development as the main theme for its ...

Former studies have focused on issue prioritization in parliaments and compared the priorities of both political elites and citizens to measure their level of responsiveness to the general public. To date, this topic was ...

Acquiring outlying community hospitals is one approach commonly used by large tertiary care hospitals to increase referrals. Sophisticated acquirers may also seek to selectively increase referrals of more profitable patients. ...

This issue brief proposes a framework for awarding bids in a public tender for exploration blocks. The context for the proposal is Mexico’s energy reform of 2013-2014. For the first time since 1958, a new oil regime has ...

Objective: To test whether the availability of vascular surgeons and interventional radiologists in a region affects revascularization and amputation rates for patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD). Methods: We ...

The Middle East is endowed with approximately 20 percent of the worldﾒs proven reserves of natural gas in the world. The cost of transporting Middle Eastern gas, however, is so high that it is difficult to exploit it ...

This paper reviews an event of 30 years ago from the perspective of today: a successful G-5 initiative to reverse what had been a dangerously overvalued dollar. The “Plaza Accord” is best viewed not as the precise product ...

The Plaza Agreement, followed by the Louvre Agreement, is remembered as one of the most significant events in the history of international finance in the post WW-II era. Witness accounts show that Japan was more than willing ...

This working paper first develops a Reference Case that allows required rates of return on investments in energy infrastructure to vary geographically. Those rates of return reflect an assessment of the risks associated ...

At the present time, solar power is not a competitive fuel for supplying electricity to the grid in the United States. However, an economic model developed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) forecasts ...

The post-9/11 era has created a number of distinct and demanding national security challenges for the United States. One of the greatest challenges is to decide when and how to use military force. In the debate prior to ...

The Comisión Reguladora de Energía has implemented a netback rule for linking the Mexican market for natural gas with the North American market. This paper describes the economic analysis that supported this policy. We ...

This report reflects an effort to assess the status of seismic risk implications on the nuclear plants providing energy in Japan. In this regard, existing and projected plants along with their power capacity have been ...

Trade-offs between economic efficiency, growth, and distributional equity permeate economics, including discussions of tax policy and tax reform. Computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling is one tool that is often used ...

It is not possible to deport the 10 million to 20 million undocumented workers currently in the United States without incurring unacceptable political and economic costs. However, there is not a consensus in the United ...

Proposed reforms of Japan’s electricity supply industry are quite modest by international standards. In particular, while the retail market has been the focus of reform efforts, the wholesale market has been largely ignored. ...